Richard Bach Quotes

When I write a story, it's not like I'm thinking about what I'm doing

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

I only type every third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue, but so far there is nothing easier than writing.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

I have no control over my writing. I have lots of good intentions, but no control. There's a story that wants to be told.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

I have great difficulty sitting in the middle of the night and writing. Everything I do comes spontaneous. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it comes just like that.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.

The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.